Friday, March 9, 2007

sicker than sick

For those of you who haven't heard, my Josh is one sick puppy. Wednesday night he came home from work and was feverish, felt terrible, and had a RAW sore throat.

Thursday morning he woke up, still was feverish, still felt terrible. He made himself a doctor's appointment and told me he was fine enough to drive himself there.

I believed him.

When I hadn't heard from him after his appointment, I called his cell phone to see how it was going. He babbled pretty incoherently and managed to get out, "Come get me." So Hannah and I race to the clinic to pick him up. We find him curled up in a ball, asleep on the exam table, while the doctor is trying to wake him up and give him medication and instructions. He told me that Josh was hallucinating in the office due to his high fever, he had been throwing up, and was pretty out of it. The doctor said it was most likely strep and sent us on our way with an antibiotic.

By about six o'clock last night, he had a fever of 105. He would not wake up very well, was spouting off with all kinds of gibberish (again, the hallucinations). I force-fed him some Motrin and called for a blessing. He didn't even budge when the home teachers came over. Didn't get out of bed, didn't respond, didn't even open his eyes. By this point, I was starting to get a little worried, so I paged the doctor on-call. He told me to take Josh to the emergency room (standard doctor answer when they can't/don't want to deal with you and your sickness after their workday is done). I was still a little doubtful - and not wanting to spend six hours in the ER unnecessarily - so I called my good friend, Vicki, who just happens to be an ER nurse. She came over, took one look at Josh, and calmly told me, "If we can't get him down the stairs, we're going to call the medics. He needs to be seen now."

Luckily, we were able to load him into the car ourselves, and I called another friend to come stay with my kids. Dear, sweet Vicki called ahead to the ER (WHICH WAS ABSOLUTELY PACKED WITH PEOPLE) and when we got there, they had a bed, an IV, and a doctor waiting for us. She stayed with me the entire time (even though it was her night off - she had already worked a full day) and she took great care of us. I am confident that without Vicki, we would have waited about two hours just to get seen; she had us in a room faster than we could blink.

They ran a battery of tests on Josh (blood work, chest x-ray, and lumbar puncture to check for meningitis) - all of which thankfully came back negative. They pumped him full of IV fluid, as well as some IV antibiotics, and some pain medication to help with his throat. It was a little scary, and watching them do the lumbar puncture nearly made me pass out (quite literally - had to go sit in the hall with my head in between my knees until it passed), but otherwise it went okay. Got home at about one o'clock in the morning, so we're pretty tired today.

He is doing so much better though - the fever is down and I am trying to push the liquids so he doesn't get dehydrated again. They think it's just a really severe case of a strep infection that just ravaged his body. Thank heavens it's not something worse.